House, City, World, Nation, Globe

From Mondothèque

This timeline starts in Brussels and is an attempt to situate some of the events in the life, death and revival of the Mundaneum in a broader context, and in relation to both local and international events.
By connecting several geographic locations at different scales, this small research will hopefully provoke cqrrelations in time and space that could help us formulate questions about the ways local events repeatedly mirror and recompose global situations. Hopefully, it can also help to see which contextual elements in the first existence of the Mundaneum were different from the current situation of our information economy.

The ambitious project of the Mundaneum was imagined by Paul Otlet with support of Henri La Fontaine at the end of the 19th century. At that time colonialism was at its heights, bringing important income to occidental countries, and creating a sense of security that made everything seem possible. In the opinion of even some of the most forward thinking persons of the time, it felt the intellectual and material benefits of rational thinking could universally become the source of all goods. Far from any move for independence, the first tensions between colonial/commercial powers were only starting to manifest themselves, already some conflicts opposed them for the defense of commercial interests during Fashoda and also the Boers war. On another hand, the sense of strength brought to colonial powers by the large commercial incomes, was quickly tempered by the first world war that was about to start in modern European society.

In this context Henri La Fontaine, while constantly energized by Paul Otlet's encompassing view of classification systems and standards, strongly associates the Mundaneum project with an ideal of world peace. This was a conscious process of thought; they believed this universal archive of all knowledge, represented a resource for the promotion of education towards the development of better social relations. However, while on the one hand Otlet and La Fontaine were not directly aware of economical and colonial issues their ideals were nevertheless fed by the wealth of the epoch. Furthermore the Mundaneum archives were established with an intention, and a major effort was done to include documents that referred to often neglected topics, or that could be considered as alternative thinking, such as the well known archives of the feminist movement in Belgium, but also information on anarchism and pacifism. On an other hand, in line with the general dynamism caused by a growing wealth in Europe at the turn of the century, the Mundaneum project seemed to be always growing in size and having larger ambition. It also clearly appears that as the project was embedded in the international and "politico-economical" context of its time, the Mundaneum was also linked by many aspects to a larger movement that engaged civil society towards a protostructure of networked society, via the development of means of communications and international regulations, Henri La Fontaine was part of several international initiatives for example as early as in 1907 the Bureau International de la paix, but also little after, in 1910, he launched the International Union of Associations; overall his intervention helped to root the process of archive collection in a larger network of associations and regulatory structures. In fact, Otlet's view of archives and organization extended to all domains and became overwhelming, and La Fontaine asserted that general peace could be achieved through social development by the means of education, and access to knowledge. Their common view was nurtured by an acute perception of their epoch, they observed and often contributed to most of the major experimentations that were triggered by the ongoing reflection about the new organization modalities of society.

Museology merged with the International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) which had its offices in the same building. The ever-expanding index card catalog had already been accessible to the public since 1914. The project would be later known as the World Palace or Mundaneum. Here, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine started to work on their Encyclopaedia Universalis Mundaneum, an illustrated encyclopaedia in the form of a mobile exhibition.

The ever ambitious process of the Mundaneum archives took place in the context of a growing internationalization of society, at the end of the 19th century, while at the same time the social gap was increasing due to the booming of industrial society. Furthermore, the internationalization of finances and relations did not only concern industrial society, it also acted as a motivation to structure social and political networks, among other things via political negotiations and the institution of civil society organizations. Several broad structures dedicated to the regulation of international relations were created at the same time as the worldwide spreading of an industrial economy, they aimed to formulate a world view that would be based on international agreements and communication systems regulated by governments and structured via civil society organizations, rather than left to individual and commercial initiatives. Otlet and Lafontaine spent a large part of their lives attempting to formulate a mondial society. While La Fontaine clearly supported the organization of international networks of civil society organizations, Otlet, according to Vincent Capdepuy [1], is the first person to use the term Mondialisation in French far ahead of his time in advocating what would become after World War 2, an important movement that concerned a number of instances who claimed to work for the development of an international regulatory system. Otlet also mentioned that this "Mondial" process was directly related to the necessity of a new repartition and the regulation of natural goods (understand diamonds and gold...), he says: « Un droit nouveau doit remplacer alors le droit ancien pour préparer et organiser une nouvelle répartition. La “question sociale” a posé le problème à l’intérieur ; “la question internationale” pose le même problème à l’extérieur entre peuples. Notre époque a poursuivi une certaine socialisation de biens. […] Il s’agit, si l’on peut employer cette expression, de socialiser le droit international, comme on a socialisé le droit privé, et de prendre à l’égard des richesses naturelles des mesures de “mondialisation”. » [2]. The two approaches of La Fontaine and Otlet might already bear certain differences, as one (Lafontaine) emphasizes an organization based on local civil society structures, which implies direct participation, while the other (Otlet) focuses more on management and global organization managed by a regulatory framework. It seems interesting to take a look at these early concepts that were participating to a larger movement called "the first mondialization", and understand its difference with actual globalization, that also involves private and public instances and different infrastructures.

Indeed, Otlet and Lafontaine's project took place in an era of international agreements over communication networks. While it is known and often a subject of fascination that the global project of the Mundaneum, also involved the conception of a technical infrastucture and communication systems that were conceived in between the two World Wars. Some of them such as the Mondothèque were imagined as prospective possibilities, but others were already implemented at the time and formed the basis of an international communication network, consisting of postal services and telegraph networks. It is less acknowledged that the epoch was also of international agreements between countries, structuring and normalizing international life; some of these structures still form the basis of our actual global economy, but they are all challenged by private capitalist structures. The existing postal and telegraph networks covered the entire planet, and agreements that regulated the price of the stamp allowing for postal services to be used internationally, were recent. They certainly were the first ones during where international agreements regulated commercial interests to the benefit of individual communication. Henry Lafontaine directly participated to these processes while when he asked for postal franchise to be negotiated for the transport of documents between international librairies, to the benefit of among others the mundaneum archives. Lafontaine was also an important promotor of larger international movements that involved civil society organizations; he was the main responsible of l'"Union internationale des associations", that acted as networks of information-sharing setting up modalities of exchange to the general benefit of civil society.
Furthermore, concerns were also raised by the necessity to rethink social organization that was harmed by industrial economy. This issue was addressed in Brussels by the brand new discipline of sociology [3] l'"Ecole de Bruxelles" to which Otlet and La Fontaine took part was very early in the process of trying to formulate a legal discourse that could help to address social inequalities, and eventually think regulations that could help to "re-engineer" social organization.

The Mundaneum project differentiates itself from the contemporary search engines such as Google, not only from its intentions, but also from the context of its organizations as it clearly inscribed itself in an international regulatory framework that was dedicated to the promotion of local civil society. In the same way as previously, it could be interesting to understand similarities and differences between the actual development of the Mundaneum project and the actual knowledge economy? Therefore the current timeline attempts to re-situate the different events in order to help to situate the differences between past and contemporary processes.

DATE

EVENT

TYPE

SCALE

1865

The International Union of telegraph, is set up it is an important element of the organisation of a mundial communication network and will further become the International Telecomunication Union (UTI)[4] that is still active in regulating and standardizing radiocommunication .

Otlet and Lafontaine organize a Central Office for International Associations that will become the International Union of Associations (IUA) at the first Congrès mondial des associations internationales in Brussels in May 1910.

ASSOCIATION

CITY

1907

Henri Lafontaine is elected president of the Bureau international de la paix that he previously initiated.

PERSON

NATION

1908 July

Congrès bibliographique international in Brussels.

EVENT

CITY

1910 May

Official Creation of the International union of associations (IUA). In 1914, it federates 230 organizations, a little more than half the existing ones. The IUA promotes internationalist aspirations and desire for peace.

Two separate ITU committees, the CCIF (Consultive Committee for International Telephony) and the CCIT (Consultive Committee for International Telegraphy) were joined to create the CCITT, an institute to create standards, recommendations and models for telecommunications.